#one day I'm gonna talk about imbra culture. it's not even super duper built out I just enjoy it

[void-botanist]

What kinda technology do people use to listen to music in the locality space setting? Is it the same as irl or is there cool sci-fi technology for it, or both? Is it different for pajiir and delphonus?

This is such a good question, Kendrick, and it helped me iron out some worldbuilding thoughts about warps. I'm guessing this came from my ask answer about Pat's old stuff, which got me kind of stuck to start - the reason he has old music stuff is because in Old Canon he was the music guy, king of the radio. The canon was weird back then, with Spinder's whole family being faeries living on Earth. I believe canonically Spinder was born in 1958, so radio and record players were a big part of his childhood. But factoring in all of the locality space worldbuilding, and keeping my timeline straight, I think it's a little more complicated.

The space era that they live in, with relatively easy access to space and permawarps, came to be about 90-100 years ago, which means that's about when there started to be a major shift in music delivery, because you could then receive music via warp from just about anywhere. I think there was already essentially a galaxy-sized Napster network, because warp witches and also starships existed before the launch era, but in terms of radio/streaming formats that's when things really took off. The only problem was you needed a warp receiver, and at first the only stable mechanical warps were those generated by enchanted machine song, which meant that all of your music was delivered with extra noise, something like how CRT TVs make high-pitched whining noises. Not ideal, but extremely popular. Then someone figured out how to besmallen the technology used for warp gates, and true hi-fi warp radio was born. Which is a long-winded way of saying by the time Pat was born 40 years ago this was a solved problem. The thing is, I always imagined him having vintage stuff because it's stuff from when he grew up, not because he's a collector (though he could be that too). So what makes his music paraphernalia outdated?

Partly it's that it still relies on midsize receivers, which are still small enough to fit in a stereo, but fill a very different niche than the much smaller receivers that became available when he was a teenager and that he probably still owns instances of. I also think he's kind of a nerd about music stuff and was into amateur radio, warp and otherwise, for a while, so he has that stuff too. Also, despite the fact that magic allows most ship environments to be fairly planet-like, oh boy is it easy to market a music storage format to planetsiders based on the fact that it could work in zero g. Don't ask me how it works in zero g, but it does, somehow. Maybe not even well, because that's not the point - 99% of buyers are going to be using it in an environment with gravity. But in general formats did get hardier. I think it would be extremely funny if current music storage formats are just like. cuboids. and you put them in the player slot and its suspension-laser-refraction array can read a shit ton of data out of it, sort of like encoding things in diamonds. I'm not totally sure about that one but making the jump from "space CD" to "music cube" or something similar would make a lot of stuff outdated. So I guess to answer your second question it's kind of the same, especially for planetsiders (radio waves never became obsolete &c.) but there's some weird scifi stuff in there somewhere beyond warp receivers, which are pretty everyday.

Now for Pajiir and Delphonus I do actually have a more solid answer, which is: it's mostly the same as real life, with some 1920s-30s flavoring, though a lot of technology is circuit mycelium on the inside, and the internet has been around a whole lot longer so the concept of streaming/digital files/internet radio is even more established. That said, there is one fictional format that actually is integral to the whole plot of Icepith: the twist. (I swear I had a cooler name for it but this works.) The basic concept is that pieces of music tracks are recorded on metal wires and twisted together as essentially an industrial cable segment. A player can play them all in tandem, but importantly, you can untwist the twist and replace parts of it, which makes remixing easy and has led to a huge remixing culture among imbrath (the underground bat people, like Rolf), and by extension nswl. This is the basis of Snap and Rolf's doomed music career, and of Oruga's pirating. Rolf's friends/lovers who supply Oruga are wire producers.